Software running on a computer system (i.e., a data source) may replicate data stored at the data source to other computer systems with unused disk storage (i.e., storage systems) for the purpose of backup and/or data distribution. Many information technology (IT) departments of corporations have data retention policies that require the periodic backing up of various data stored in employees' corporate-issued personal computers (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, email, etc.) as well as data stored in the data centers of such enterprises (e.g., company financials, back-end systems, etc.). Maintaining a sufficient amount of dedicated enterprise-grade storage to support such data retention policies can be a significant cost to a corporation. In the aggregate, unused portions of local storage in employees' corporate-issued personal computers and existing corporate servers, at any particular point in time, may comprise a significant amount of storage that simply lies fallow. While, in theory, such unused storage could alleviate the storage pressures of a corporation's data retention policies, obvious issues regarding (1) the reliability of such local storage, and (2) the possibility of using up local storage that was originally provided for a different purpose (e.g., for use by an employee to accomplish his job duties if in the employee's corporate-issued personal computer, etc.) deter corporations from trying to leverage such local storage to satisfy data retention policies.
In a different use case for replication of data, content distribution networks, such as a nation-wide television network, may include one or more clusters of video servers at a network operations center and a hierarchy of regional and local caching servers throughout the network to facilitate faster distribution of video data when requested by a consumer's media center computer system. In this use case, content distribution software running on the video servers may replicate video data out to the regional and local caching servers in anticipation of high demand in order to minimize bandwidth consumption across the network and also to reduce latency experienced by the end user at the moment when they request the video data. Such media center computer systems regularly include large local storage drives to store video data, which also present potentially significant amounts of available storage space (as well as similar issues with respect to utilizing that available storage space).